Our Troubled World

As I listen to coverage of the elementary school shooting in Connecticut this morning, I am flooded with emotions. I feel profound sadness for the families of these victims. I feel grateful that I never had children or grandchildren to worry about being killed or becoming a killer. I feel anger at the young man who committed this heinous crime. I also feel pity for the same young man who must have suffered much mental torment. I feel appalled that parents are allowing their children, who can't possibly yet comprehend what has happened, speak to ruthless news reporters as if they're describing the latest shoot-'em-up video game. I feel terror that so much of this horror is happening in the world these days. I feel anxiety at hearing this news over and over, time and again, and yet, I feel shame that I can't turn it off. I shudder when I think about the parents getting the phone call this morning.

The events of the day take me back in my mind to the innocence of my own childhood. I grew up in small towns of a few thousand residents. It was a time when parents could never have imagined that there might come a day when their grandchildren and great-grandchildren wouldn't be safe sitting in a classroom or playing in their front yards. When mass shootings would be commonplace, and kids would carry knives and guns in their backpacks. In the late 1960s and early '70s, while I was growing up, children played outside until dark and nobody gave a second thought to allowing their kids to walk to their friends' homes or to school.

Our room was the one on the far right of the second floor

I was two years older than my sister, and some of my favorite memories are of the many hidey holes where we played in our large old house. There was a big walk-in closet in our room where we would sit and play store or school, and in my early teens I plastered the walls inside with pictures of dreamy celebrities clipped from Tiger Beat and 16 Magazine. There was a neat little cubby underneath the front staircase landing with a triangular door, and we would climb in and play the board games stored there. Under the large front porch was a perfect little playhouse with a dirt floor and lattice-covered windows to let sunlight in. The row of lilac trees across the back property line enclosed an impressive dirt Matchbox car track. The monstrously huge walk-up attic filled to the gables with boxes and bags provided many hours of fun and surprises... including an old set of dentures discovered beneath a loose floorboard. A narrow hall-like enclosed back staircase with steps to color on and roll things down and ended in the second-floor hallway where there was a door out to a roof-top porch floored in metal that would blister your feet in the summertime sun.

We had a spooky dreary basement with a big old wood cook stove a past resident had left against the wall, a coal shoot we no longer used in a creepy dark corner, a wooden corral beneath the clothes shoot where we would drop things from the little trapdoors in the wall of the first and second floors into the dirty clothes. There was the earthy-smelling cool root cellar filled with potatoes, tomatoes, onions and jar upon jar of canned goods my mother had put up every year from her backyard garden. At one end of the basement, stood a ringer washtub and a large cast iron wash sink where Mom would wash clothes for her family of seven, and  one corner had a shower curtain strung across, concealing a shower head and a commode sat beside it out in the open, so we never had to leave our wonderland when nature called. We played for hours down there. I'll never forget the day we had a fight and I ran up the stairs, flipped off the light, and held the door shut while my little sister screamed and pounded on the other side, and my mother's stern face and warning that something like that could make her go crazy for the rest of her life. She was mad as a wet hen when she got out, but she was fine, although I still feel the sting of that scolding.


We were pretty good kids, although we found enough mischief to make life interesting. There were no computers or cell phones, and television was reserved for Saturday morning cartoons and evening family shows like The Waltons and Grizzly Adams, Little House on the Prairie and Apple's Way. I remember our 8 PM evening "treat" before bed, which was often a glass of soda pop. That makes me chuckle now as I down a whole 12-pack of Mt Dew by myself per day, and it's never tasted as good as that rare glass of Root Beer. 

Children in my day made their own entertainment. Old school papers, with their mimeographed purple ink bleeding through the back, kept my sister busy while I supervised her "tests" in our bedroom schoolhouse. Our handmade sandbox with wads of grass poking up through the building-grade sand was a popular spot for the neighbor kids. The front porch was a hang-out for pre-pubescent teenager wannabes. I still remember coming home from school and dragging my sister out to the overturned rowboat in the yard to show her how I'd learned to dissect an earthworm. It was so cool! 

Me & my sister, with the infamous Christmas doll, in 1975

With Christmas around the corner, I recall one of my favorite holiday memories. It was a snowy Christmas Eve and my sister and I were in our shared bedroom preparing for bed, when we looked out the window and saw Santa Claus walking down the middle of the dark abandoned street! It was so exciting! Of course, later I realized it was probably a drunk in a costume stumbling home from a Christmas party, but to us it was Santa in the flesh, and he was right in front of our house! Along with that, I recall one of my most disappointing and shameful Christmases. It was 1973, and I was 11 years old. That was the year I discovered Santa wasn't real. Naturally, I couldn't allow my little sister to continue to believe such lies, so I took her into my parents' bedroom and told her to look under the bed, where there was a big box with a child-sized dolly inside. I told her, "just watch... that doll will be under the tree Christmas morning with Santa's name on it." I don't think she's ever forgiven me, even 4 decades later.

Me as Santa for a 1974 school Christmas party

My heart hurts today for those parents who have to face Christmas without their little ones around the tree excitedly opening colorful wrapped packages, and for those children who had to grow up in the blink of an eye when their siblings, friends and teachers were gunned down in front of them. There will be no Christmas for those families this year, and it makes me weep. I almost feel guilty reminiscing about my own innocent happy childhood on a day like this, but right now that feels like the only way I can cope with the sadness I feel.


I pray for comfort and healing for the families and friends of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14. 2012. Bless the memory of the lost.